Nice trick? No, you know what’s a nice trick? Bringing out devices
that no one can actually use. I know they work. I could see that
one of the Microsoft guys was all logged into his. But why not let
us actually use them, especially when you’ve made us wait from 10
to 60 minutes specifically, as we were told, so we’d all have some
close-up time with Surface.

No journalist seems to have really used any of these at the launch
event. None of the hands-on reviews that I’ve read, having been in
that room and toured the stations, have anything that reflects any
real hands-on activity to me. There’s plenty of careful
photography that can give the impression that hands-on was going
on. Some of it doesn’t even illustrate how the last station with
the Surface tablets with keyboards in them literally had a rope to
keep us away.

The only sane take on Surface at this point is, more or less, “Interesting, but let’s see what it’s actually like to use.” Because right now, no one outside Microsoft knows.